


My Avengers: Endgame Review

by zeenanigans1983



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Endgame, Gen, Reviews
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-27 02:12:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18729628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeenanigans1983/pseuds/zeenanigans1983
Summary: *SPOILER WARNING*This is my full review of Avengers: Endgame. If you haven't seen it, please do not read. If you have, you may proceed at your own volition. This is purely my opinion that I will never impose on anyone. I'm just a fan that wants to express her feelings after getting to see the movie.





	My Avengers: Endgame Review

Is it possible to be able to conclude an intricate tapestry of stories spanning 22 movies that took place within the last 11 years?

According to a pair of M&M writers and 2 brothers with an Italian sounding last name, the answer is a resounding and confident ‘YES’.

And apparently, the world agrees. ‘Avengers: Endgame’, the highly touted culmination of the first three phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has just surpassed James Cameron’s Titanic as the 2nd highest grossing film of all time and is poised to take over the other Cameron mega blockbuster Avatar as #1, in my opinion, within the next few days. In its entirety, Endgame is a fitting, melancholic way to end multiple, elaborately woven story lines while carefully setting up the MCU to continue on with new characters and stories.

The movie starts out just right after Thanos has snapped his Infinity Gauntlet clad fingers, taking out the entire Barton family, save for our OG Avenger Clint who has no clue what just happened. If his reaction didn’t break your heart and squeezed out a few tears from your eyes right away, you better get your emotions checked.  


My next question was ‘where’s Tony?’ We see him next floating aimlessly into space with Nebula, the only Guardian apart from Rocket the Raccoon who survived the snap. They play games, tinker with the ship to buy them a few more days, but Tony has seemingly given up. The once cocky, confident and brash Avenger has been reduced to a sentimental, hopeless sap as he finally accepted his fate that he will die in the middle of literally nowhere. Recording one final video for Pepper, he takes his presumably last slumber before the elements suck out the remaining life out of him.

But Carol Danvers is one persistent badass. She finally finds the ship and brings it back to Earth where an anxious and worried Pepper Potts is waiting together with Steve, Natasha, Rhodey and Bruce. This is where the first emotionally satisfying moment of the film comes when Steve immediately rushes to Tony’s side to help him. The scene only lasts for a few seconds, but one can immediately see how happy and relieved both of them are to see each other alive.

As Tony recovers, the remaining Avengers together with Rhodey and newly arrived Carol Danvers see that Thanos has used the Gauntlet once more to another unsuspecting planet. After a brief heated discussion about Danvers’ absence to help Earth, the Avengers agree to storm the Garden planet Thanos is currently inhabiting to get the stones, undo the effects of the snap and end the purple giant’s madness once and for all.

Only they didn’t get to do that. The stones have been destroyed and the gauntlet is nothing more than a burnt piece of metal that serves no important purpose than to shield Thanos’ hands from spiky fruits he has picked up to eat. Our God of Thunder finally gets his chance to take the head but it feels useless and quite frankly not the moment of victory that we were wanting to see. Thor walks away without a word and the rest of the Avengers descend into something akin to surrender but not all of them.  
The first big shock of the film comes when it dares *gasp* to move forward to five years. We see our dear Captain Rogers headline a therapy group that allows people to freely talk about their experiences post-snap and what they are doing to try and move on with their lives. He offers words of wisdom that he has credibility for, and yet his eyes tell us that he’s having a hard time believing those words himself. The loss has been too great and too jarring for him. First, his chance with his only love, Peggy Carter and the second, which I will go on in further detail later, his best friend and the only family he’s ever known, Bucky Barnes. He tells Natasha later on that he feels somewhat guilty into helping people move on while he himself can’t.

Natasha echoes the same sentiment, as we see her keeping in contact with Rocket, Nebula, Carol and Rhodey through their holographic images. While the three promises to keep in contact before leaving, Rhodey stays behind and tells the Black Widow he found her best friend, Clint. As someone who’s been trained to withhold emotion under any circumstance, it is refreshing to see Natasha finally break down and acknowledge her emotions. I would have loved to see a few more moments of her alone until Steve joins her in her little pity party.

The first arc of the film serves as a set up to the next events. Scott Lang luckily escapes the Quantum Realm and finds Steve and company to tell them how it could be the key to getting everyone back and reversing the rest of the effects of the snap. Tony is strongly opposed to the idea, believing he already had his second chance by getting to marry Pepper and having a kid with her, an adorable five year old Morgan Stark played to near perfection by Lexi Rabe. They try to go to Bruce next, who we now see has finally discovered he didn’t need to suppress his Hulk side, but rather to co-exist with him. He initially declines their request, but soon acquiesces, leading us to see all iterations of Scott Lang, from when he was a baby to old age. This has led me to believe the character will be a pivotal member of the next batch of Avengers as the next phases roll on.  
The second arc is where we get to see a little bit more action and a lot of nostalgia. As Tony has perfected the mechanics of time travel, we see the Avengers get their assignments to find and bring back all six Infinity Stones to use on a new gauntlet. Natasha, totally clueless as to what the Soul stone requires, giddily tells Steve and the others that she’ll see them all ‘in a minute’.

This would have been our first clue that getting all six stones back is harder to do than they have planned. Tony and Scott botches their first chance on the Tesseract when they go back to the final events of the first Avengers while The Ancient One goes on a diatribe with Bruce about how wrangling the Time stone disrupts the very fabric of reality that may affect all other realities that exists. On Morag, Rhodey, now in full War Machine regalia and Nebula doesn’t have much trouble getting the orb with the Power stone in it but little did they know that their presence was soon to be found out by the Mad Titan himself which will then set off the events of the third arc of the movie.  


The first painful and for me, surprising loss happens at the expense of the Soul stone. It took me a hot minute to remember what getting it entails when Clint and Natasha were in the ship taking them to Vormir, with him quipping how where they are is so different from Budapest. I was suddenly dreading the next few sequences and my heart broke when they had to fight to the end to see who finally gets to make the ultimate sacrifice. At first glance, it seemed unfair that it had to be Natasha to do it, but her motivations lie pure and clear. The Avengers were the only family she had ever known and it is because of this that she would do anything in her capacity to ensure that this family is preserved and kept intact no matter what the cost, even if it meant her life. It is in her death as well we see the rawest emotions from Steve, Bruce and Clint, the three men who have meant so much to her as friends. 

Natasha’s death is one of the things that would propel our remaining Avengers to move ahead with their plan. With all six stones in possession and a Stark-made gauntlet at the ready, Tony combines them and the team has a discussion as to who would be strong enough to wield it. At the surface, being a God himself, Thor offers to do it, but Steve and Tony decide him to be emotionally incapable as he currently is going through a bout of PTSD. Our favourite Norse guard has let himself go, gaining weight and not caring about anything anymore, except for ensuring he’s got booze anywhere he goes. While the jokes are cringe worthy and sometimes downright uncomfortable, I understood why this was the context they put Thor in. While many see this as fat-shaming, I don’t see it as such. I see a man stripping himself off of his invincibility and for once allowing himself to feel the spectrum of emotions afforded to any other regular being. For the longest time Thor has had to keep himself in check as the King of Asgard while being the protector of eight other realms. If this is how failing to destroy Thanos affects him, then so be it. After taking the journey of becoming the man he is ‘supposed’ to be, he deserves to embark on another to become the man he ‘chooses’ to be. Besides, beer gut or none, Thor is still delightfully nice to look at.

The third and final act finally takes us right after the second ‘Snappening’. As anxious as I was to see everybody again, (especially one particular super soldier *wink*) 2014 Thanos barges in and destroys the Avengers facility with the presumption that by doing so, he kills everyone in it. But alas, our heroes are very persistent mofos as they power through the debris and rise up to face the Mad Titan once more. Chills ran down my spine as Tony, Steve and Thor (with BOTH Mjolnir and Stormbreaker!) walk up to Thanos to confront him for what they hope is the last time.

While it is true that our heroes couldn’t accept their failure the first time, it is not just merely personal as what Thanos implies. Our heroes wouldn’t be called The Avengers if they can’t do what their name says, which is to avenge the deaths of millions of people in the place they call home. And avenge it, they do. We are treated to a spectacular three versus one battle that had me clapping and wanting to hoot and holler at the same time. I screamed when Mjolnir finally confirmed what us die hards have been wishing for since that party scene in Age of Ultron when Steve was able to move the hammer even just for a tiny bit. Finally, he was worthy! A friend has said this and I couldn’t agree more—reason why he was finally able to do so is because he has let the guilt go in as far knowing who killed Tony’s parents. Tony, we could all assume behind the scenes, has forgiven him and this allowed for him to move on and continue to be his honourable, righteous self. Thor was like a proud father when he said ‘I knew it!’, making me realize he may have secretly wished Steve would finally one day be able to wield the hammer himself.

Robert Downey jr. couldn’t be any more correct when he said that this would be their finest moment. I couldn’t put into words the sheer emotion that washed over me over that scene where Captain America, with half a shield in hand stood up straight, the sun going down behind him while Thanos’ enormous army converged in front of him. For me this was truly epitomizing who Steve Rogers was, as Dr. Erskine said, a good man. A good man who knew never to give up, even if the circumstances were way against him. But fate had other plans for our Captain, as this was also the moment everyone who got decimated in the snap finally decided to show themselves. I nearly jumped out of my seat when Sam’s voice crackled through Steve’s comms until everyone came out of the portals. Running out of things to say, I could only blurt out an emphatic ‘Yes’ as Steve finally was able to say ‘Avengers, ASSEMBLE!’

And my god, the battle was all kinds of glorious. We were treated to all kinds of surprises—Pepper with the Rescue suit, Wanda finally getting her revenge, Brunnhilde and the rest of the Valkyries making an appearance, I mean, it was hard to keep up but never once did it feel overwhelming, if anything, it really felt like you were seeing the culmination of not just the events of the movie but of the whole MCU as well. As a fan, I could not be any happier that the Avengers did finally assemble quite literally in the grandest battle ever.  


But as always, the battle cannot be won by sheer fighting alone. Sacrifices need to be made and towards the end of it, it felt inevitable that the one who started it all would be the one to end it as well. Tony Stark wielding the gauntlet and doing the snap to end Thanos once and for all was the 1 possibility Stephen Strange saw out of 14,000,605. This could probably be the reason why he gave up the Time stone in Infinity War. He probably knew that Tony would make the sacrifice. As heartbreaking as it was to see him die, it made absolute sense in the grand scheme of things. He had done so much for the Avengers and for the world, and he felt it in his heart that this was his chance to finally rest, even if it meant leaving the life he dreamed of behind. My eyes couldn’t stop from crying especially after that last kiss from Pepper and I was a full, blubbering mess when the funeral scene rolled around. The Marvel Cinematic Universe would not be what it is today without Robert Downey jr. and his perfect portrayal of Iron Man and that scene at the river with his first arc reactor was a perfect tribute to the man who made it all happen.

The last few scenes let us see how the other OG Avengers deal with their new/renewed realities. Clint talking about Natasha with Wanda, Thor passing on the crown to Brunnhilde as the new leader of Asgard before joining the Guardians, and Bruce helping Steve return the stones to where they were originally before they were taken. The emotional payoff seems to be worth it, until you get nitpicky with the consequences. In another post, I’ll deal specifically with Steve’s decision to have a life with Peggy and its implications most especially with his friendship with Bucky Barnes, aka the Winter Soldier. (I kid you not, I have some really serious tea to spill on that!)

To wrap it up, Endgame is not a perfect movie, but it serves as a great love note from Marvel to its loyal fans who have kept up with their Universe for 11 years. It is a spectacle that is truly of this generation and I am very glad that I have been there from the start with Iron Man to this.


End file.
